Laval attended Furman, but did not play football because he was small and the school did not have a football team during his time. He played baseball instead, managing and playing in minor league baseball through the 1919 season. During those days, he supposedly discovered Shoeless Joe Jackson.

As Furman’s baseball coach, he assisted with football before taking over partway through the 1915 season. He studied the game and was open to out-of-the-box thinking, though his greatest strength was his effectiveness as a coach. His Furman boys regularly beat more highly regarded teams by focusing on execution and a variety of trick plays, such as reverses.

For the 1925 season, Laval created the Crazy Quilt formation. His team broke the huddle, lined up in the Crazy Quilt, executed a final pre-snap shift, and snapped the ball as soon after completing the shift as possible. Their unusual alignments apparently allowed selected players to quickly shift right or left, creating numbers advantages on one side of the ball or the other.

He wasn’t alone in snapping the ball soon after the shift. Zuppke created the modern huddle, in part, to snap the ball soon after his Illinois team got to the line. Rockne had the Irish snap the ball soon after completing the Notre Dame Shift, so Laval was not alone in using the tactic with his oddball alignment.

Few period descriptions provide details about the Crazy Quilt and why it worked. However, opponents hyped the formation before every game they played since scout teams often had success against their varsity teams when preparing for Furman, and his teams did well, going 7-3, 8-1-1, and 10-1 in the three years he ran it at Furman. They also beat Clemson and South Carolina each year, leading South Carolina to hire him for the 1928 season.

Parts of the football community complained about the shifts, but with Rockne’s Notre Dame team stealing the headlines, the Rules Committee was reluctant to make a substantive change. Instead, they increased the penalty for offside by the offense from 5 to 15 yards, while keeping offside by the defense at 5 yards.

Laval used the Crazy Quilt with the Gamecocks as well, and made noise in the second game of the season and the first intersectional game in school history by traveling to Chicago and beating the Maroons 6-0. Nevertheless, Laval never recaptured the success he had with the Crazy Quilt at Furman.

The Gamecocks went 6-2-2 that year and 6-5 the next as opposing coaches increasingly complained about Furman, Notre Dame, and others employing late shifts. Florida’s Charlie Bachman was especially incensed with South Carolina’s approach, demanding that the 1930 Rules Committee implement a change, and they did. Rather than teams needing to wait “approximately one second” after a shift, they now had to pause “at least one second,” with referees instructed to increase their silent count from 4 to 6.

With the rule change approved, Laval announced that his teams would no longer run the Crazy Quilt, though they would continue to use trick plays. Throughout his time at South Carolina, Laval’s teams struggled to beat the top teams in the SIAA, and South Carolina let him go following the 1934 season after he refused to take a pay cut during the athletic department’s budget crisis.

Laval moved to Emory and Henry for two years, then took over at Newberry, where he coached for another dozen years.

Laval mostly had middling teams at those schools before calling it quits after the 1950 baseball season.

So, Billy Laval had his teams wear crazy emblems on their jerseys and an unusually tricky formation as distractions, allowing his often lesser teams to compete with their opponents, even if they racked up fewer wins than desired.

Thanks to Christopher Haack for the heads up on the Crazy Quilt.

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As in England, the games known as football in pre-Civil War America were a mishmash of folk kicking games, most often played on college campuses as part of class hazing rituals. Generally, the freshmen and sophomore classes played one another on or around the first day of classes. There were deviations, such as Brown’s 1854 game when the freshmen and juniors faced the sophomores and seniors. The mob games were rough-and-tumble affairs. Bruises and bloody noses were common under rules that are difficult to disentangle 175 years later. To illustrate, I provide the full newspaper articles covering the madness below. The first article addresses Yale’s frosh-soph battle of 1852.

Even the yokels out at Woodward College, now part of the University of Cincinnati, played football. Their game saw alums playing and slipping in cow patties during a 1854 reunion.

Although it is difficult to identify the games’ rules, they share elements with football and soccer. Both involved large numbers of players kicking, carrying, and tossing a ball around, with points scored when it crossed a line. However, because the rules varied from place to place, it was difficult for one college to play another. Not so in other sports. American intercollegiate athletic competition debuted in 1852 with a crew (rowing) competition between Harvard and Yale on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. Seven years later, Harvard and Yale met on the diamond in the first intercollegiate game of nines.

Knowing that American colleges competed in other sports before the Civil War, one wonders how football and intercollegiate sports in America might have changed had two schools played each other in football during the antebellum years.

The idea is not inconceivable, as Harvard challenged the students at “any three colleges to beat them at foot ball” in April 1856. Whether Harvard was open to playing three schools separately or an ensemble cast from three schools is now unclear. Whatever their intentions, only the boys at little Dartmouth in New Hampshire’s north woods were open to playing Harvard, and they were willing to go it alone.

Newspapers in the Northeast, even Washington, D.C., and Indiana, carried blurbs about Dartmouth and Harvard likely meeting that summer in Concord for a football game and other athletic contests, but the event never took place.

Instead, things went in a different direction. Yale’s freshmen class declined to play the sophs in the fall of 1856 before the faculty banned the game in 1857. Harvard played their frosh-soph game in 1856, with the juniors and seniors joining the fray, a contest that ended with all joining in with a hearty rendition of Auld Lang Syne. Despite the students’ singing prowess, Harvard’s faculty banned the mob-style game in 1860.

Following the Civil War, students began playing similar kicking games with fewer players, making it easier for the games to transfer to intercollegiate play, provided two schools could agree on a set of rules. The 1869 soccer-like games between Princeton and Rutgers featured 25 players per side, while Harvard and Yale favored 15 or 11 per side in the 1870s.

As covered elsewhere, the Harvard games with McGill and other Canadian teams pushed rugby to the forefront, eventually leading to the IFA’s establishment in 1876 as the governing body and the adoption of a set of rules, modified annually ever since, that define today’s game.

For me, 1876 marks the start of American football, a point Walter Camp dances around in his American Football of 1891 and other period writings. And, since it is always fun to illustrate a point with an attractive visual, here’s Camp and Spalding’s splendid little advertising die cut from 1896 of a Yale football player. The back side includes a history lesson that falls just short of calling 1876 the start of football:

The origin of foot ball is shrouded in doubt, but the first game in this country between elevens was played in 1876 by Yale and Harvard.

Regardless of the date of football’s origins, many schools continued playing mob games as part of hazing rituals, but those games never translated into intercollegiate play. Instead, they went the rugby route, which turned into football.

Still, while mob football never moved beyond a game tied to individual campuses, it might have gone in a different direction. What if Harvard and Dartmouth had gotten together in 1856 and played a mob-style game? Had they continued playing, other schools might have joined the fun. Even if mob-style intercollegiate games did not become popular, Harvard’s position at the center of the collegiate sporting world might have led to elements of the Harvard-Dartmouth mob-style game becoming part of the intercollegiate rugby/football rules.

In any event, it’s fun to think about what might have been if Harvard and Dartmouth had followed through with their plans in 1856.

Good News: The fundraising effort to have the Library of Congress scan its copy of the 1884 college rule book was successful. I’m waiting for the LOC’s final proposal and will place the order once it’s received.

Thanks to Vasav, Andrew, Chris, Billy, and Mike (x 2) for their paid subscriptions, and to Steve and an anonymous donor for buying a few coffees.

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Pigskin Dispatch Podcast’s Darin Hayes and I discuss Gene Roberts’ career, a player who set a record or three that may never be broken, having led the NCAA, NFL, and the Interprovincial Rugby Football Union (Canada East pre-CFL) in scoring in particular seasons.

Watch or listen to the podcast here or on other podcast feeds. You can read the original Tidbit below.

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Many schools that dropped football were medium-sized urban schools that struggled to fund the sport as coaching staffs and rosters expanded during the two-platoon era. Sports fans fixating on televised games rather than attending college games in person also hurt the cause. However, as the research for the series has progressed, I’ve become convinced that an underappreciated factor in college football’s urban demise was the cost of land. Schools in more remote settings had land aplenty, but those in concrete jungles were often landlocked, paying a pretty penny for each parcel, including those needed for football stadiums and practice fields.

Even outside the cities, early football teams often played their games on disused pieces of open land that were swampy or in flood plains. Such was the case for the University of Iowa, which played its first football game in 1889 at Grinnell.

The teams met again in 1890, this time in Iowa City on a narrow open field squeezed between the Iowa River and a railroad track. The drawing from Iowa’s 1894 yearbook below shows the football field in the foreground, the baseball field in the background, and a bridge crossing the river in the upper left.

Over time, they formalized the football stadium as Iowa Field and expanded it several times, ultimately leading to two significant challenges. One was the Iowa River. With the stadium planted right next to the river and unable to move said river, they could only increase the capacity of the west stands by having the uppermost seats overhang the water.

The other problem was the CRANDIC, or the Cedar Rapids and Iowa City Railway. As seen on the cropped version of a 1920 Iowa City map, the CRANDIC interurban line crossed the river just north of Iowa Field, then turned south, running 100 or so yards east of the river, just beyond the eastern stands.

In 1922, with demand for football tickets at an all-time high, the Iowegians decided to expand the eastern stands, railroads tracks be damned. To do so, they moved the tracks farther east in the stadium area, which helped the cause. However, to fully address the problem, they had to build the stands over one line of tracks. Plenty of football fields have been located next to railroad tracks, but few have risen above them. You can see the tracks running under the stands in the 1922 photo below.

Aerial views from 1923 and 1925 offer a clearer view of the railroad tracks passing under and alongside the stands, suggesting that Iowa should have adopted the Boilermaker name rather than the other black-and-gold folks two states to the east.

Ultimately, the 1922 expansion of Iowa Field proved insufficient, leading the Hawkeyes, with limited land on the west side of the campus, to build a new stadium atop the former golf course ground on the western edge of campus. Originally called Iowa Stadium, it is now known as Kinnick Stadium.

And, as early believers in the Reduce | Reuse | Recycle mantra, my local informant tells me the steel from the dismantled Iowa Field was incorporated into the upper deck seating of the Iowa Field House in the early 1930s.

Postscript: The original article claimed the Iowa-Grinnell game was the first collegiate game west of the Mississippi. A reader pointed out that Minnesota and Hamline played in 1883, which I confirmed in a period publication.

Thanks to Bill Claypool for signing up for a paid subscription and suggesting this topic.

The fundraising effort to have the Library of Congress scan its copy of the 1884 college rule book is approaching its goal but needs a few more pushes. Let’s get down in our stances and push that sled forward.

Thanks, Vasav, Andrew, Chris, and Billy, for their paid subscriptions, and to Steve and an anonymous donor for buying a few coffees.

As a reminder, I send a copy of one of my books (your choice) when you acquire a new annual subscription.

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Those woodsy or seaside days involved long walks and runs, plus swimming to loosen the boys’ muscles and ease them into shape for the real work that started upon returning to school. Teams often did not bring any football gear to camp, though that changed over time.

Professional football teams held remote training camps beginning in the 1930s for many of the same reasons as colleges, with the added aim of avoiding the temptations of big cities. From the beginning, most pro training camps were held at small colleges in cool, northern climes, with Wisconsin being a disproportionately popular location. Curly Lambeau even promoted other teams choosing Wisconsin at the NFL owners’ meetings in 1939, which may have helped the state teachers college in Superior land the New York Giants that year, while the Chicago Cardinals were just across the border in Duluth.

Today, we have air conditioning, which allows teams to hold preseason camp at their year-round or headquarters facilities, complete with meeting rooms, weight rooms, and other accouterments of modern football. Among today’s NFL teams, only the Dallas Cowboys camp more than an hour and change away, choosing California as their home away from home.

Mentioning California allows us to transition to 1946, the first year the NFL rival All-American Football Conference played ball. Unlike NFL teams, which had a few years of training camps under their belts, the AAFC teams were all new and choosing their training camp sites for the first time. That allowed numerous towns to market themselves as the ideal location to host 60 or so very large men with insatiable appetites for food, drink, and family-friendly entertainment.

Each AAFC team made their decisions by early May. Press releases announced their camp locations. with five of the eight teams choosing the West Coast, despite only two teams calling the Left Coast home.

People in Bend, Oregon, read in the newspaper that the AAFC’s Brooklyn Dodgers were looking for a training camp location in the Northwest. The Chamber of Commerce got busy, formed a committee, and dreamed of the Pacific Northwest becoming the home of pro football training camps, much as Florida was for baseball. Their hard work and determination led to the city fathers and Bill Cox, the Dodgers’ owner, signing on the dotted line twelve days later.

Proving themselves willing to Bend over backward, the town burghers guaranteed $9,000 in gate receipts for two intrasquad games in town, below-market pricing for the team’s stay at the Pilot Butte Inn, access to the local country club, and guided fishing trips. In exchange, Bend mostly received publicity, as newspapers across the country printed Bend, Oregon, in the byline of every story about the Dodgers. Meanwhile, the townsfolk received six weeks of excitement watching professional athletes play on the local high school field and stroll about town.

The Buffalo Bisons, who initially planned to camp at St. Bonaventure in Olean, New York, learned that the glut of returning servicemen taking summer classes at the school left no room in the inn for a pro football team, leading them to shift west to the comfy climes of Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, which the pronunciation-challenged refer to as Wisconsin Five-O.

If you’ve ever wondered where in Oconomowoc you might find a home for Bison to roam, they found it at a grand home built by a tycoon on the shores of Okauchee Lake in the 1870s. The site became a hotel, then an abbey for Cistercian monks, and apparently had extra space for 65 football players and coaches in 1946. Like the good citizens of Bend, the leaders of Wisconsin Five-O bent over backward to host the team, providing access to the high school facilities and local armory

Another franchise, the Chicago Rockets, camped in Santa Rosa, California, north of San Francisco and Napa Valley, allowing them to scrimmage and play exhibition games with other West Coast teams, including the San Francisco 49ers and the Los Angeles Dons.

While Santa Rosa was a perfectly fine place to train in 1946, the Rockets switched locales in 1947, choosing Two Rivers, Wisconsin, instead. Located where two rivers empty into Lake Michigan, the town’s name is pronounced “Trivers” by locals. As in similar towns, the leading citizens of Trivers had stars and dollar signs in their eyes, envisioning that more than one pro football team might train there and spend money on facilities, food, drink, and gas. Members of the press would tag along, and others would come into town to see what the fuss was all about.

The area had previously hosted the Philadelphia Eagles, Columbus Bulls, and Pittsburgh Steelers, so adding more teams was not out of the question, but the town needed to market itself. What do you do in Trivers to sell yourself to pro football teams as the ideal training camp location? You build a roadside sign for all to see on their way into town.

Sure enough, the Chamber of Commerce and others got together to design a sign featuring a very tall wooden football player dressed in a scarlet Rockets uniform to welcome people as they entered town.

While the sign made the unverified claim that the monster was the world’s largest football player, he stood 35 feet tall, had a 22-foot-long arm, and a 5-foot hand, so he was a pretty big boy. John Lachowicz, a city employee, managed the monster’s design and construction, ably assisted by his vacationing cousin, Mike Kazar, an art teacher at Milwaukee’s Pulaski High.

Someone also got the idea of printing linen postcards of the Trivers monster to promote the town and its welcoming attitude toward pro football teams. Luckily, one of those postcards arrived in my mailbox today, allowing me to share its full-color glory with you. Ain’t it a beaut?

Despite the welcoming attitudes of Bend, Oconomowoc, and Two Rivers, all three learned that pro football teams can be rather fickle. In April of 1947, the Dodgers announced their intention to return to Bend for camp, but a month later, Sun Valley, Idaho, stole the show.

The Buffalo Bison, renamed the Bills in 1947, opted to stay close to home that year, camping in nearby East Aurora, New York.

Despite the best efforts of the Trivers populace, the Chicago Rockets did not return to town after the 1946 season. Instead, they spent their summers in Ripon, Wisconsin. They did the same in 1949 when they had become the Chicago Hornets.

The AAFC folded after the 1949 season, and neither the Dodgers, the Bills, nor the Hornets were among the franchises welcomed into the NFL. Opportunities for small towns to attract pro football training camps were limited until the AFL arrived in 1960.

It is unclear when the world’s largest football player lost his roadside home at the Trivers city limits. The town has a new roadside sign today, which, other than the words printed upon it, is indistinguishable from the welcome sign of any other town or subdivision across the country.

Whatever you might think of the Goliath that once welcomed visitors to Trivers, he was unique and helped the town stand out from the crowd, though not enough to get the Rockets to return there after the AAFC’s second year.

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Yet football is most often a game played by those who toil in obscurity and never make the big time, so it makes sense to occasionally look at the game played by the average Joe or Jose. Often, that involves teams sponsored by middle and high schools, even small colleges, but sports teams once had a wider range of sponsors, including businesses large and small. In big cities, factories and other enterprises had employee teams playing tackle football in industrial leagues.

Outside the cities, town teams played one another.

The best of these teams achieved semi-pro or even professional status. The Staley Starch Company sponsored the Decatur Staleys in the late 1910s and early 1920s, before the team became the Chicago Bears in 1922. The Acme Packing Company sponsored Curly Lambeau’s team in little Green Bay, where they’ve managed to stay thanks to the NFL sharing its broadcast revenues.

Generally, each team had one sponsor, but when a team could not find one sponsor willing to foot the bill, they found multiple sponsors. The players pictured below have sponsor names on their jerseys. Their teams may have had only one sponsor, but I don’t think so.

An example of the multi-sponsor system involved Weeb Ewbank, who played on semi-pro teams his older brother Vernon managed in Richmond, Indiana. One team, called the Richmond Merchants, had each player’s jersey bear the name of the merchant who sponsored them.

That setup brings us to the Nineteenth Street Trojans, whom I discovered through the image below, which shows a group of teenagers wearing football jerseys atop street clothes.

One player wears a helmet as they squat or stand in an unkempt field with a factory or warehouse in the background, bearing a painted sign for a sheet metal company. The back of the photograph identifies the team as the 1938 Nineteenth Street Trojans, but what’s notable is that each member has the name of a different sponsor on their jersey. Among the businesses whose names are legible are:

• Barada Grill | Chester Bar-B-Q | Court Drug | Dark’s Service Station

• Hampton CourtsJack the Barber | King Edmond Apartments | Koslen’s Grill

• Murphy’s Garage | Red Raven | Sharp Service

Had the Nineteenth Street Trojans worn jerseys with the team name or logo, figuring out where they played would have been difficult. There are many Nineteenth Streets across the country, and only one team named the Nineteenth Street Trojans shows up in the newspaper archives between 1935 and 1945. It was a Pee Wee baseball team in Anniston, Alabama, so they were clearly not our boys.

However, with 22 different sponsors named on the jerseys of the players, coaches, and mascots, a search for those names shows they were small businesses in Cleveland, specifically the area around Cleveland State University’s Krenzler Field, the school’s soccer stadium, which opened in 1985. In fact, the location of one sponsor, the Hampton Courts apartments, is now occupied by the Krenzler Field stands and press box.

In the 1930s, Cleveland State was Fenn College, a small commuter school, situated in a dense, working-class neighborhood. Parts of the neighborhood were razed when I-90 came to town in the 1960s. Cleveland State and other businesses took over other parcels, many of which are now parking lots, so there is little trace of the old neighborhood the Nineteenth Street Trojans called home.

Despite various searches for information about youth or touch football teams in Cleveland during that period, and the individual sponsors, little information turns up. Without the printed team picture that has survived the last 80 years, we might not know that the Nineteenth Street Trojans ever existed, or that twenty-some small businesses ponied up a few bucks to sponsor players.

The same disappearing act will happen to most of us, our neighborhoods and towns, and our local teams. What will sports historians in the year 2114 know about our teams and us? What tools will they use to make those discoveries 88 years down the road? Will they be stumped in finding information, as has happened with the Nineteenth Street Trojans? Will our family libraries of digital images be preserved and accessible like family photo albums and postcard collections of the pre-WWII era?

Your guess is as good as mine.

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Sligh appeared in 8 games for the AFL champion Raiders, making him the tallest player on either roster for the first Super Bowl, a height not topped since. (Sligh did not play a snap in the game.)

When the Cincinnati Bengals entered the AFL for the 1968 season, they selected Sligh in the expansion draft, though they cut him several weeks into training camp, ending Sligh’s pro football career.

Of course, the story does not end there. It does not even begin there, not by a long stretch, because there was an even taller professional football player back in 1946.

Ralph Siewert, who shared his initials with Richard Sligh, played football and basketball for Dakota Wesleyan in 1944 and 1945. I won’t tell you his jersey number, but see if you can pick him out of the team picture below.

As a cager, Siewert made a name for himself in the 1946 NAIB basketball tournament (the predecessor of the NAIA) by holding the nation’s leading scorer to 4 points, 17 points below his average. Despite his hardwood talents, Siewert seems to have had limited football ability. Still, since you can’t teach height, his potential led the AAFC’s Chicago Rockets to sign him for their inaugural 1946 season. (Several AAFC teams joined the NFL or merged with NFL teams in 1950, and AAFC statistics became part of NFL records as of April 2025.)

Standing 7’ 1” or 7’ 2” and weighing about 250, Siewert, and end, received praise early in camp, and, as a novelty, he garnered publicity for the new league. Unfortunately for Siewert, the Rockets cut him near the end of training camp, ending his professional football career.

Not to worry, Siewert quickly turned his attention to roundball, signing with the Midland Dow team of the National Basketball League (NBL). By January, he had signed with the St. Louis Bombers of the Basketball Association of America (BAA). (The NBL and BAA merged in 1949 to form the NBA.)

Siewert saw limited playing time with the Bombers. However, he gained additional publicity with a story about his costing the Bombers extra money when traveling because the railroads had to remove the partition between two Pullman sleeping berths to allow him to stretch out. Later that season, the Toronto Huskies purchased Siewert’s contract, and he finished the season with them.

Siewert spent the 1948 season with the All-American Circus traveling team -a White version of the Harlem Globetrotters. After playing the 1948 season with the Billings All-American and the 1949 season with the Detroit Vagabond Kings, he left professional basketball and played only recreationally.

Despite limited success with the Chicago Rockets, the Midland Dow, the St. Louis Bombers, and the Toronto Huskies, Ralph Siewert was one of the few athletic seven-footers of his day, allowing him to hold the unique distinction of being the first seven-foot-tall player in both professional football and professional basketball.

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At the time, George Preston Marshall owned the Redskins, which began as the Boston Braves in 1932 before moving to the nation’s capital in 1937 and changing names. Besides being racist, Marshall was a notorious skinflint who cut behind-the-scenes expenses such as travel and staff salaries, earning a reputation as the “last of the small-time spenders.”

The first NFL draft came in 1936, when teams did little or no scouting. Most relied on recommendations from friends in the college coaching community, or acquaintances with little or no qualifications as player evaluators. More than one player got drafted based on comments made in Street & Smith’s and similar publications. The Redskins carried on that tradition for another decade and more.

Their choice of Cal Rossi in the 1946 draft was the worst pick ever. He graduated from Santa Barbara High in 1943 and began his college career in a Navy V-12 program at USC, though he did not play football there. He entered UCLA in the fall of 1944, starting at halfback as a freshman. The following season, on a team stocked with WWII veterans whose college careers had been interrupted, Rossi shared duties with several other backs, leading the 5-4 team in rushing with 679 yards and earning first-team All-PCC honors.

In the 1946 NFL draft held in January, the Redskins picked Rossi in the first round, ninth overall.

It was a surprising pick, since Rossi had just completed his sophomore season and, by NFL rules, was ineligible for the draft. Only players whose original college class would graduate in the spring could be drafted. So, nothing against Rossi, but it was not a smart move by the Redskins.

During the 1946 season, Rossi’s rushing total trailed teammate Gene Rowland’s 540 yards, but the Bruins went undefeated during the regular season, and Rossi was named second-team All-PCC for a team that lost to Illinois in the 1947 Rose Bowl.

The NFL held its 1947 draft in December 1946. Although most teams initially kept their draft choices secret to avoid broadcasting their evaluations to the rival AAFC, the Redskins happily announced their selections. Having screwed up the 1946 draft, the Redskins brain trust decided to go for two, using their first-round pick on Rossi once again.

Who can blame the Redskins for picking the talented Mr. Rossi? Everyone, since Rossi told people in advance that he would return to UCLA for the 1947 season and had no interest in playing pro ball.

Rossi played for UCLA has senior season, led the 5-4 Bruins in rushing, graduated with the highest per carry career average in program history, and started in the 1948 East-West Shrine game.

Rossi went undrafted by the NFL and AAFC following his senior season. (Washington retained his NFL rights from the 1947 draft.) True to his word, he took the first of his three jobs teaching and coaching in LA-area schools before spending most of his career in administrative roles with the California Teachers Association.

College football and the NFL have changed mightily since the 1940s, including the option for players to declare for the draft early. The changes in eligibility and the systemization of the scouting and drafting process make it unlikely we will again see a player drafted two years in a row in the first round by the same team and never play a down in the NFL. But you never know, strange things can happen. Someday, the Vikings might win the Super Bowl.

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Pigskin Dispatch Podcast’s Darin Hayes and I discuss the origins of pass defenses, and specifically, whether man-to-man or zone defense came first. The answer might surprise you.

Watch or listen to the podcast here or on other podcast feeds. You can read the original Tidbit below.

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It might have been harder to carry a football high and tight back then, since the ball was two inches thicker around the middle with more rounded ends, but it would have been more important to do so. The manufacturers had not yet developed methods to make football leather as tacky as today, and playing on the poorly drained, often muddy fields of the day made the ball more slippery, leading to fumbles aplenty.

You know the balls were different by the fact that Reach still called them Rugby Foot Balls, a practice that was still mainstream.

Available in lined and unlined versions, the unlined balls supposedly flew higher and farther when kicked, though they often were misshapen by the end of a game. The C5 and E5 balls cost $10 apiece.

Below the $10 premium ball, Reach sold Rugby Foot Balls at many price points. They offered the 5EW “Nite” Rugby Foot Ball, made of white cowhide, which was great for late practices, and the earliest example of a commercially available night ball I recall seeing. The price of balls falls steadily until the nadir of the $1 youth ball, with a tough canvas lining that hopefully allowed for endless afternoons of play.

Of course, none of these balls had surface-mounted valves, so they had to be unlaced to reinflate them. That’s why they shipped every foot ball and accompanying bladder with a lacing needle in the box. Some assembly required.

Then there were the helmets, which offered top-of-the-line protection against concussions and other head injuries. The 1AA model cost $10, just like Reach’s best Rugby Foot Ball, which is equivalent to $190 today. The 1AA was:

…up to the minute in design, material, and construction. Special features built into our helmets, were developed by players who know the value of comfortable fitting head gear which allows complete freedom of action and affords positive protection to the wearer.

Besides the written description of the model’s excellent padding, the illustrations show the sponge-rubber crown, the fibre crown, inner web crown, the half-inch thick felt padding, and other elements that went into such a fine instrument.

Notable among the offerings was the RB College model (shown second from the top of the left page), which they covered in black strap leather except for the back half of the crown, since:

This makes players easily distinguishable by their team mates. A real help in forward pass and many other plays where knowledge of position of players is required.

Yep, in the days when opposing teams often wore nearly the same shade of red or black and blue, and everyone wore brown or black helmets, a spot of white leather on a helmet’s back helped identify your eligible receivers from the other seventeen players on the field.

And, like Reach’s foot balls, not everyone could afford a $10 helmet, but for $2.50 you could get one of two head harnesses or the padded flattop version.

Then there were those pricey shoulder pads, topping out at $12 per. Two models are worth mentioning. One is the #27 Varsity, which, like the others, has armlet straps to keep the shoulder pads in place and side or chest straps that became the norm among future shoulder pads.

The RP model, aka the Reach Improved Special Shoulder Pad and Rib Protector, is a beautiful specimen, and one hopes that a few remain on display in someone’s collection. The number of cows harmed to protect a player’s ribs is unknown, though the wearer paid his penance every time he laced each of the fifteen rows.

They also sold kidney, blocking, shin, and other pads for the well-protected fellows out there.

That’s is for the 1925 Reach catalog review, Saturday’s article included a crowdfunding appeal to pay for the Library of Congress scanning of the 1884 college football rule book, which is in their collection but not available online. A few kindhearted and intelligent readers have already acquired paid subscriptions or bought a few coffees, which is wonderful, though we remain short of the goal.

Nevertheless, their actions as faithful readers helped move Football Archaeology to #24 on Substack’s Rising Sports blog list.

A few more paid subscription and donations will take us to the goal and move Football Archaeology further up the charts.

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I admit both my dorkiness and an ignorance of William Fellowes Morgan, which ended several days ago. Searching for information about Morgan led to yesterday’s story about the 1882 British Football Club and its attempt to convince the American football community to right its wrongs by returning to playing by rugby rules.

Now, about Captain Morgan, an honorific he earned as captain of Columbia’s football team in 1879. I learned of his role in football history while conducting my periodic search for early college football rule books. If you believe, like me, that American football, and American college football specifically, started in 1876 with the IFA’s slightly bastardized adoption of the Rugby Union rules, then the 2026 season will be the game’s 151st. Since the NCAA has not yet released its 2026 rule book, we have enjoyed 150 sets of rules to date, each of which shows how people believed the game should be played at the time, making each rule book a time capsule of the game for that year.

One of my life missions is to collect a copy of each of those 150 rule books. To date, I’ve sourced them by buying printed copies of Spalding’s Football Guides and their descendants. I’ve picked up a few from 1800s newspapers, which sometimes printed the full set of rules, since they were much shorter than today’s. I’ve also downloaded PDF versions of 1800s rule books from the Library of Congress, which is about the only affordable way to acquire them, and the 2000s, which is the only way the NCAA seems to have issued them.

In one form or another, I have “printed” copies of 127 of the 150 college rule books to date, and am missing the following years:

• 1877-1978, 1880-1881, 1884-1887

• 1985-1991, 1993-1995, 1997, 1999

So, my periodic search led me to take another look at the 1882 rules issued by the American Inter-Collegiate Association (aka the IFA), and I noticed that William Fellowes Morgan, the previously identified Columbia captain, had copyrighted them.

The IFA members named Morgan its secretary that year, so he was responsible for recording their meeting minutes, handling the association correspondence, and publishing their rules.

Having never heard of the guy, I looked into him and found that he came from a prominent family and apparently spent at least one year attending Rugby School in Rugby, Warwickshire, England. Morgan enrolled at Columbia in 1876 and joined the football team, which did not win a game against Harvard, Yale, or Princeton during his four years, though it beat Rutgers, Penn, and the Stevens Institute.

Playing under the 15-player rugby rules of the time, he variously played halfback, three-quarterback, or fullback, and was often cited in newspaper reports as a splendid runner. One report of a May 1878 game with Fordham described him running with the ball after snatching it from a winded teammate, though it was for naught, as Columbia failed to kick it over the string. (Early crossbars were often a length of rope between two posts.) He suffered the indignity of having his shirt torn off his back later that game.

Morgan attended graduate school at Columbia after that, which allowed him to play two more years with the boys, when they still considered him Columbia’s best, as seen in a report from their November 1882 game with Harvard.

So, Morgan is a guy you and I have never heard of before, yet he issued football’s rules for the 1882 season. Who took his place as secretary and issued the rules for 1883? Someone named Walter Camp.

Morgan left the football scene after the 1882 season, eventually making a fortune in the emerging fields of refrigeration and cold storage. Outside the workplace, he held numerous leadership roles in amateur tennis and golf, served as a trustee at several colleges, and was president of the National Society for the Prevention of Blindness.

I’ve told you almost everything I know about Morgan and the 1882 Rule Book, but the same search process that brought me to Morgan also led me to the 1884 Rule Book, which was the second edition published under Camp’s name. It is one of the years I have not found in a printed edition, but the search helped me discover that the Library of Congress has a copy of the 1884 rules. For one reason or another, they have scanned only the title page, not the full edition, so it is not available to the public, as are many early rule books.

My searches have not identified anyone else with an edition of the 1884 Rule Book, so I contacted the Library of Congress to determine the cost of scanning the 1884 rules. After receiving quick, informative replies, I learned it will cost $200 to $250. As much as I would like a PDF of the 1884 rule book in my computer’s grubby little hands, I am unwilling to pay that freight, so I’ve decided to crowdfund the effort.

It would be great to help the Library of Congress share this document with the world, and I am asking readers (especially those who are not paid subscribers) to pony up for this effort. Whether you get a new paid subscription ($5/mo or $50/year) or donate through Buy Me A Coffee ($3 at a time), I’d like to raise the money to make this document available to everyone.

Once the Library of Congress scans it, I’ll encourage them to make it available (or I will do so). I will also come back with a story about the rule changes and the 1884 season, which will surely be among my most scintillating efforts to date.

What do you say?

Postscript

Bill Claypool alerted me to the fact that almost all the missing 1980s and 1990s rule book PDFs are available on the NCAA site. They appear to have added some recently, and I was not searching the database correctly.

The running total as of April 29 is three new annual subscriptions and 8 coffees for $214.00

Thanks, Vasav, Andrew, Chris, Billy, Steve, and another anonymous coffee buyer.

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As in rugby, there were 15 players per side, so each team had one quarterback, two halfbacks, one fullback, and two three-quarterbacks. The IFA made several minor rule changes over the next few years, but found that the game was more interesting when they played a style of rugby different from that played in England. Specifically, the Americans liked picking up the ball and running with it, which was legal in rugby but was frowned upon. The typical Rugby Union game emphasized kicking the ball forward in the scrum and picking it up only when it inadvertently popped out.

To promote the open, running game, Walter Camp and Yale proposed reducing the number of players per side from 15 to 11 and instituting the rule of possession, which gave one team control of the ball at the start of each scrimmage. The team in possession could either kick it forward as before or heel it back to the quarterback, who picked it up and tossed it to a teammate to start a run.

After rejecting Yale’s proposed rule changes once or twice, the IFA approved them in 1880. The problem was that the new rules gave one team possession of the ball but did not require them to relinquish it. The team with the ball did not have to advance it and was not penalized for safeties, which meant that teams -we’re looking at you, Princeton- sometimes found it advantageous to stall, not even trying to advance the ball.

Princeton stalled in the 1881 championship match against Yale, a game that was particularly boring and became known as the “block” game. It just so happened that a few subjects of Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, who were alums of Rugby School in England, attended the block game and found it appalling. Granted, they were right about that game, but rather than watch the IFA change a few more rules, they wanted the American sportsmen to give up their bastard game and return to playing Rugby Union rules.

To that end, James Rankine, Edward H. Moeran, and others began the new year by forming the British Foot-Ball Club in New York. They expected to have fun playing the game of their youth, challenge the American colleges to a few games, and convince the heathens of the error of their ways.

In January 1882, the 60-member club began meeting at St. George’s Cricket Ground in Hoboken, or the original Polo Grounds in Upper Manhattan, to practice and play amongst themselves.

That April, Rankine, Moeran, and several other leaders of the British Football Club members invited the IFA to a meeting at Delmonico’s in an attempt to mentor the colonists. The IFA attendees included:

• Princeton: E. C Pearce (captain) and J. S. Harlan

• Yale: Walter Camp (captain) and Emmett Williams

• Harvard: H. M. Manning (captain) and H. G. Leavitt

Rankine presented the IFA with a resolution proposing that they abandon the American game and play Rugby Union. The IFA members responded that they began playing under Rugby Union rules in 1876 and found them unsatisfactory, prompting modifications. The Irish-born Edward Moeran then told the Americans that he had witnessed two games played under American rules, and:

...if that were a sample of the way in which the games were to be played it would be better to crush foot-ball in its infancy.

‘The Game Of Football,’ New York Times, April 9, 1882.

Having told the Americans that their baby was ugly, Moeran gained few points by acknowledging that he appreciated the American practice of not tackling below the waist, before slipping further still when he said he did not like that Americans kicked the ball backward (i.e., heeling it back). Despite the Queensmen’s best arguments, the Americans wanted nothing to do with rugby as played at the time, and the meeting ended with the groups agreeing to disagree.

By that point, Camp and others were already discussing a rule change requiring the team with the ball to advance five (or lose ten) yards in three downs to keep possession, a rule they adopted at the October 14, 1882, meeting.

The British Football Club continued its efforts, aiming to show New York City and the college football world the beauty of rugby. They scheduled two November games against the Britannias of Montreal. Few people attended either game; the Britannias won both, and the British Football Club dissolved soon thereafter.

Of course, the rule of possession and the system of downs proved to be among football’s most important breaks from rugby, the forward pass being the other. Still, had the meeting at Delmonico’s with the British Football Club gone differently, you might be reading this article on the Rugby Archaeology site. Hell, had the decision gone the Brits’ way, Americans might speak English today.

However, that is not how it went, and America continued in its own direction, followed a few decades later by Canada, which chose its own variation on the gridiron theme. The rest of the world played Rugby Union, and/or developed their own national variants.

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Dropkicking was fading fast when Thorpe appeared in the film. Advances in snapping and placekicking, and rule changes that made the ball narrower and pointier in 1929 and 1934, made dropkicking a dying art. Nevertheless, a few practitioners existed during the 1930s and early 1940s before it mostly disappeared.

Nearly any search about dropkicking nowadays brings up Doug Flutie’s dropkicked conversion in a New Year’s Eve 2017 game when he played for New England.

While Flutie’s dropkick came while playing in the NFL, it led me to ask whether any other Heisman Trophy winners successfully dropkicked in a college or NFL game. As it turns out, there were two.

Through the 1940s, quarterbacks and running backs commonly kicked PATs, and among the era’s Heisman Trophy winners, some handled them on a full- or part-time basis, though most placekicked.

• 1938: Davy O’Brien | placekicked field goals and PATs

• 1940: Tom Harmon | placekicked field goals and PATs

• 1942: Frank Sinkwich | placekicked PATs in NFL

• 1943: Angelo Bertelli | placekicked PATs

• 1945: Doc Blanchard | placekicked 1 PAT in 1945 season

• 1948: Doak Walker | placekicked PATs and field goals in college and the NFL

• 1950: Vic Janowicz | placekicked PATs and field goals, including OSU record of 10 PATs in one game

Other early Heisman winners did not kick at all, while two winners are known to have scored by dropkick.

Iowa’s Niles Kinnick dropkicked 11 of 17 PAT attempts during the 1939 season. One came in their game versus Minnesota.

Two years later, Minnesota’s Bruce Smith won the Heisman Trophy. Although Minnesota generally subbed him out when attempting field goals and PATs, he dropkicked two PATs early in the 1940 season against Washington.

So, despite the demise of the dropkick, it hung around long enough that the fifth and seventh Heisman winners dropkicked the ball over the crossbar during their college days. Let me know if you find another one.

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Pigskin Dispatch Podcast’s Darin Hayes and I discuss why end zones were first decorated in 1927, the originator of one design, and his younger brother, who made another important contribution to the game. The younger brother also played in a game against Carlisle in 1912, which is how Jim Thorpe literally enters the picture.

Watch or listen to the podcast here or on other podcast feeds. You can read the original Tidbit below.

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I stumbled upon the school through an RPPC found on eBay labeled “S.M.C Football Team.” The seller identified the pictured team as the 1908-1909 St. Martin’s College team from Lacey, Washington, as confirmed by the postmark and divided-back style of the postcard. Information about the football team is limited. Newspaper articles confirm they played football during the time, with the two available game scores showing victories over high school teams.

It is a beautifully formatted period image. Teams from colleges big and small had fewer team members than today. They did not need more, given the era’s limited substitution rules, and with smaller rosters, the team pictures commonly showed the starters, and perhaps a few more, lined up one after another, as described in a previous story.

While the image had inherent appeal, the most interesting element about the RPPC is the guy in the middle, wearing white shoes and socks. (Scroll up if you did not notice the white shoes the first time.) The conventional wisdom and my previous research indicated that no one wore white football shoes back then -other than the guy in the picture- but his appearance led me to take a fresh look at the history of white shoes.

I wrote about white shoes in How Football Became Football, noting that the owner of the 1946 Boston Yanks, Ted Collins, said he would outfit his team in white shoes so fans could more easily spot their running backs, though images from that season’s games do not show them shod in white. I then mentioned Army wearing white shoes as a psychological ploy for the 1962 Army-Navy game, before turning to Joe Namath, who wore spatted, and later, white shoes, at Alabama.

His wearing of white shoes as a New York Jets rookie in 1965 opened the floodgates, as other players began painting their shoes white before sporting goods companies made them an option, and shoes in all colors of the rainbow followed.

I should note that early American rugby/football players wore shoes made in England of kangaroo leather, often tanned in a lighter color, but they soon switched to black leather shoes, always high-tops. For example, Yale team pictures show everyone wearing lighter-colored shoes in 1876, while everyone had switched to black leather by 1883.

Upon returning to the white-shoe research mine, I found that the 1956 New York Giants wore white shoes during their championship game victory over the Chicago Bears. However, those white shoes were a one-time deal driven by function rather than fashion. They were basketball shoes that provided better grip than football spikes on Yankee Stadium’s icy turf.

So, was there anyone who consistently wore white shoes between our friend at St. Martin’s College and Joe Namath’s time? Indeed, there was. On the opposite side of the country from St. Martin’s College is the University of Rhode Island, where Frank Keaney coached basketball from 1920 to 1948. He won 76 percent of his games with his Run and Shoot offense, which introduced the fast-break, tempo-oriented offense to basketball and earned him spots in basketball Halls of Fame.

Keaney was also URI’s football coach from 1920 to 1940, and from 1935 to 1938, his teams wore white shoes beneath their baby blue uniforms, a look that seems odd when paired with maskless leather helmets, but that’s only because other teams did not adopt the look.

Unfortunately, I did not find an explanation for Keaney’s fashion choice or its discontinuation. Nevertheless, other than at least one guy in 1908 or 1909, a basketball Hall of Famer appears to have introduced the practice of football teams wearing white shoes, and while his shoe color innovation did not catch on for nearly 30 years, his impact on basketball was far more fundamental.

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While the airplane drill involved the team itself, the school, its fans, and those of rival teams got into the action in the late 1920s and early 1930s through the Palo Alto School of Aviation and its associated airport.

During the 1920s, it was unclear whether commercial airlines would dominate air transport or whether everyday consumers might have airplanes to take them from place to place. Ever on the cutting edge of innovation, Stanford also had plenty of empty land on the 8,000-acre farm that ol’ Leland Stanford donated in 1885, which allowed them to lease land to Lt. Norman A. Goddard and the Palo Alto School of Aviation in January 1928. An airport with its associated buildings soon appeared on campus, only a long forward pass from Stanford Stadium, which then sat 89,000 fans.

While not legally affiliated with the university beyond the lease, some Stanford students treated flying lessons with Goddard and his wife as an extracurricular activity.

Despite student interest in aviation, it was not the students who found the airport so convenient. Instead, it was Stanford and rival alums who found the airport handy on fall Saturdays to figuratively jet over for a game. The 1928 USC game attracted a sizable number of fly-ins, but it was the Big Game that caused all the excitement. Apparently, an enterprising marketer got the idea to send aloft tethered balloons with hanging advertising near the stadium. Lt. Goddard found their encroachment on his personal airspace annoying, so he reportedly took off in his plane with a pistol to shoot down the balloons, only to miss and hit an earthbound car.

The 1929 USC game saw the airport visited by 150 to 200 airplanes, most of which parked there during the game before returning to LA. Airport officials estimated demand for landing slots at 500 planes, fueling speculation that stadiums of the future might include nearby facilities for private planes.

The 1930 season saw fans from Oakland and San Francisco avoid earthly traffic by shuttling to the game by air. Not only did fans take advantage of the neighboring airport, but so did the Los Angeles Times. The Times had pictures taken during the first half of the 1930 USC game and had them flown south by aviatrix Florence Lowe Barnes, who traveled the 300 miles to Van Nuys in 1 hour and 39 minutes, allowing the pictures to appear in Sunday morning’s newspaper.

Of course, all good things come to an end, and folks soon realized that an airport located near a huge football stadium, schools, and surrounding neighborhoods might not be a great idea. While a large number of planes came and went for games through 1933, the 1930 death of Lt. Goddard in a glider accident did not help the Palo Alto School of Aviation’s prospects; those flying to Stanford games soon found more distant landing spots.

More broadly, private aviation airports near football or other athletic stadiums never really took off as people found other ways to get to games. What once seemed like the future of aviation proved to be little more than a pie-in-the-sky idea.

The research for this story turned up a YouTube video of Lt. Goddard flying a glider in 1929. He lands safely in the end, but it provides some sense of the sketchiness of private aviation and gliding at the time.

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Early in football history, few schools had large on-campus stadiums, so they played the big games that attracted sizable crowds at alternative venues, often at major- or minor-league baseball stadiums distant from both schools. The early IFA championship games in New York City often featured Yale and Princeton. Hampton Park in Springfield, Massachusetts, was another favorite location for big Eastern games of the 1800s.

Army and Navy faced a similar situation. Their first four games (1890 to 1893) were on campus, but only two -their 1942 and 1943 games- have been on campus since then. Seventy percent of their games have been in Philadelphia, and another twenty-six percent in New York or Baltimore/Washington, D.C.

After not playing each other from 1894 through 1898, they scheduled neutral-site games at Franklin Field in Philadelphia from 1899 through 1904, at which point, the demand for tickets exceeded the supply. Penn was a gracious host by all accounts, allocating one-third of the tickets to Army, Navy, and themselves. Penn distributed their portion of the tickets to Penn students and its athletic supporters, and donated all money earned to Army and Navy widows’ relief funds.

By 1905, however, the Army and Navy each wanted more than the third of the tickets they had received previously. Navy’s enrollment had expanded, and contributors to both schools’ athletic associations, which funded sports, wanted access to the increasingly attractive tickets. And, in a theme that may sound eerily familiar, members of Congress threatened to withhold funding for academy activities unless the nation’s representatives received the ticket allotments they desired.

The situation put both ADs in a pickle. Their commandants and the athletic associations sought a contractual change that Penn opposed, leading to an impasse and a public debate documented in an exchange of letters between Penn and the academy athletic directors, both minor figures at the time who went on to prominence.

Representing Navy was William F. Halsey, Jr., who played fullback and graduated from the Naval Academy in 1904. He also played fullback in one of the first American football games played in Europe while touring with the Great White Fleet in 1909. More important, Halsey was #2 man in the U.S. Navy during WWII, commanding the South Pacific Area and later, the Third Fleet.

Palmer E. Pierce is a relative unknown today. However, he was an 1891 West Point graduate who served in the Spanish-American War, the Philippines, the Boxer Rebellion, and commanded the 54th Infantry Regiment in France during WWI. As West Point’s athletic director in 1905, he played a key role in the formation of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (IAAUS). The IAAUS developed the 1906 football rules and oversaw the game before being renamed the NCAA in 1910. Notably, Pierce was the IAAUS/NCAA president from its 1906 founding until 1913, and served a significant role in the organization until 1930.

The academies would not accept Penn’s requirement that it retain one-third of the tickets, so Army and Navy chose to play the game at Princeton. Ol’ Nassau met their demands for 7,000 tickets apiece rather than the 6,117 each received from Penn.

The game at Princeton proved a disaster, despite the attendance of Teddy Roosevelt and an estimated 25,000 others. It wasn’t the game itself, played on a muddy field and ending in a 6-6 tie due to darkness. Instead, Princeton lacked the infrastructure and facilities to handle the influx of people and special trains that descended on the city. Train delays, too few hotels, and insufficient restaurant capacity caused more dissatisfaction than any ticket shortfall ever had, so it was back to the drawing board.

In January 1906, Army and Navy considered moving to New York City or Washington, D.C. for the next game. They even looked at playing in Philadelphia’s major league parks, but Franklin Field was built for football and made the most sense from a location and capabilities standpoint. The breakthrough came when Penn agreed to install several thousand temporary bleachers behind the west goal line and to allocate the added seats to Army and Navy. Since everyone got what they had before and Army and Navy got more, they quickly agreed to return to Franklin Field. The change allowed everyone to walk away happy, while Pierce returned to helping figure out the rules football would play under for 1906.

Many colleges built large on-campus stadiums in the 1920s to handle a handful of games each fall. A few cities did the same, including Pasadena, which built a stadium that they filled only one day each year. The trend continued, so that nearly every FBS school today has an on-campus stadium to handle big crowds, even for its biggest rivalry game, and, by and large, people expect games to be played on campus.

Army and Navy never went in that direction, choosing to maintain smaller on-campus stadiums that tap out in the mid-30,000s today. Other than the two WWII games, they have played all their rivalry games at larger neutral-site stadiums, though they never returned to Princeton.

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Pigskin Dispatch Podcast’s Darin Hayes and I discuss the origins of football’s doinks, and the posters that preceded it. We cover the use of the work doink in American newspapers up to the point the John Madden applies it to kicked balls hitting the goal posts and bouncing the wrong way.

Watch or listen to the podcast here or on other podcast feeds. You can read the original Tidbit below.

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Unconscious Play

There were folks in 1908 who supported the 1906 rule changes and the move to a more open game, but they liked pointing out that more changes were needed since football remained a dangerous game. As evidence, they pointed to the Naval Academy team, which, two days after its game with Harvard, could field only two regulars for practice, with the rest too injured to participate.

However, their best example of the game’s continued danger was the Union College-Wesleyan University contest that saw both captains carried from the field in the game’s first ten minutes. Union’s captain, Cedric Potter, was not only knocked unconscious, but also broke his collarbone. By the end of the game, seventeen players had been knocked unconscious, with five sent to the hospital, all in a game ending in a scoreless tie.

Decorated Goal Posts

While sponsor logos and decorations are slapped all over college football stadiums nowadays, the goal posts are largely exempt from such frivolity. The NCAA’s 2025 rules require the crossbar and uprights to be white or yellow and free of decorative material, while the required six-foot pads on the post or posts can include one logo.

For many years, fans decorated the goal posts. There was even a report before the 1895 Chicago-Michigan game indicating that pennants flying on the goal posts would indicate the game score, though it is unclear just how that happened.

Most decorations were simple, involving streamers wrapped around the posts.

Lest you think that decorated goal posts went away long ago, the prohibition only came in 1971, though it is unclear whether a specific event spurred the change. Perhaps it was a delayed reaction to Houston fans hanging a sign from the Astrodome crossbar in 1965.

A Tree Grows in the End Zone

Some factoids are nearly impossible to find information about. A few years ago, James Gilbert sent me the image below, showing an extra-point attempt in a 1922 game against Elon or Virginia Tech on Davidson College’s Sprunt Field. (Those were Davidson’s only opponents at Sprunt Field that year.) Try as I might, I have been unable to find any information about two oddities seen in the image.

One oddity is the presence of two men in suits standing behind the holder, kicker, and referee. Who let them on the field, and what are they doing?

More concerning is the sizable tree sitting just behind the goal line. The goal posts stood on the goal line in 1922, and you can see the end line crossing the image, so the full tree and mound were in the end zone. Did Davidson lack the resources to cut down that tree, or did it hold special meaning to those on campus?

While I do not care too much about the guys standing on the field, I will be eternally grateful to anyone who can find information about that stupid tree and why the Davidsonians didn’t bother to cut it down.

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Rule 43: A player who has made and claimed a fair catch shall therefore either take a drop kick or a punt or place the ball or a place kick.

As stated, the rule allowed the player making the fair catch to attempt a dropkick for a goal, punt it, place it down for a scrimmage play, or attempt a placekicked goal. Despite the rule being as old as football, it applied only in the NFL after the colleges dropped it in 1950 or 1951 (depending on how you count). While the Division I Football Bowl Subdivision Oversight Committee approved the return of the fair catch free kick in 2026, this article will explain how the fair catch free kick evolved and why it disappeared from the college game in the first place.

In the early days of football, a player designated that he was making a fair catch by “heeling in;” that is, he dug one of his heels into the ground while making the catch. The late nature of the signal meant that coverage teams often did not wait for the signal and hit the return man, incurring a penalty and potentially hurting the returner. An 1894 rule required the returner to raise one arm in the air to signal a fair catch.

About the same time, football introduced the onside kick from scrimmage, which was governed by several sets of rules. However, from 1906 through 1922, punts that hit the ground could be recovered and advanced by the kicking team, which provided an additional incentive for the return team to catch punts on the fly, whether fair caught or not.

It is difficult to know how often teams fair caught punts once the onside kick went away, but it is fair to assume they did so far less often than today. While there are no statistics to support that assumption, statements by coaches and writers of the 1930s and 1940s suggest that it was the case. For example, a columnist in 1932 wrote:

The fair catch and free kick are two plays more or less of a mystery to the average fan. In reality they are quite simple, and the difficulty in understanding them is due mainly to their rarity.

‘Roundy Says,’ Wisconsin State Journal (Madison), October 20, 1932.

Another writer indicated in 1940 that high school players rarely fair caught the ball. Meanwhile, Duke coach Wallace Wade said in 1950 that he did not recall either Duke or its opponents fair-catching the ball during the 1949 season, and around the same time, Fritz Crisler, Michigan’s coach, claimed to have witnessed only one fair catch in the last 13 years.

With the fair catch seldom being used, the free kick after a fair catch was rarer still. Northwestern missed a last-second attempt versus Michigan in 1933, and Marquette beat Michigan State on another last-second free kick in 1939. Both attempts received media attention but were soon forgotten by many.

Believing punt returns were exciting and that the fair catch was seldom used, the 1950 rulemakers eliminated the fair catch from the college game. However, as soon as the 1950 season began, a movement started building to return the fair catch to the game.

A key reason behind reversing the rule change was the increased use of the spread punt formation. In the late 1940s, teams began taking advantage of the free substitution rules by using specialist punters and substituting some linemen on punt teams. The spread punt formation positioned the punter 15 yards behind the line and spread the linemen three to five yards apart, allowing them to brush-block the defensive line and run downfield in coverage. Unable to call for a fair catch, courageous return men often suffered the consequences.

The rulemakers listened to their audience and returned the fair catch to the game for the 1951 season. However, while they restored the fair catch, they did not allow a free kick after it. Fritz Crisler, who was also the chair of the Rules Committee, justified the decision by saying the free kick had been largely obsolete since the college game moved the goal posts to the end line in 1927.

But the times they are a’changin,’ and while you likely need to be 85 years or older today to remember the 1949 season, when college teams could last attempt a fair catch free kick, you will see a few in 2026 given the advent of soccer-style kickers and the length of today’s kicks.

And remember that 1939 Marquette win over Michigan State? As best as I can tell, that was the last fair catch free kick made in a college game. Since Marquette no longer plays football, they are unlikely to kick another one this year, but Sparty better watch out. Lightning sometimes strikes twice.

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